Jobs Speaks Out On iPhone Tracking Controversy

Apple CEO Steve Jobs and two other top executives told The New York Times Wednesday that the company will fix the way it stores location tracking data in its iPhone and iPad devices but claimed such data was not being used by Apple to track individual customers.

"We haven't been tracking anybody. Never have. Never will," Jobs told The Times.

Jobs, who is on medical leave from Apple, spoke with the newspaper alongside Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, and Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iPhone software.

Apple came under fire last week when two researchers publicized the existence of an unencrypted, hidden file on iPhones that stores location data taken from nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots. The cached data was also timestamped, backed up on iTunes and although associated with Apple's Location Services, could not be shut off by users when they opted out of the service.

It later came to light that police have been using the data in criminal investigations for months. Privacy advocates were critical of Apple and Google, another major mobile OS developer that has similar location tracking technology on devices running its Android operating system.

Earlier in the day, Apple released its first official statement on the controversy. The large amount of location tracking data stored on its iPhones and the fact that its devices continue to store such data even when users turn off the company's Location Services were "bugs" that would be fixed with free iOS software updates "sometime in the next few weeks, the company said.

Forstall said the bugs occurred because "[t] he system is incredibly complex," according to The Times.

"We test this carefully but in such a complex system there are sometimes places where we could do better," he said.

In addition to reducing the size of the "crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database" cache on iPhones to no more than seven days' worth and deleting the cache when users turn off Location Services, Apple said it would cease backing up the cache on iTunes.

The "next major iOS software release" will encrypt the data cache, the company said.

Google, unlike Apple, came clean almost immediately when it came to light that Android smartphones were transmitting location data back to the company.

Buried in Apple's statement Wednesday was an admission that, as with Google, iPhone-generated location "data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form" but that "Apple cannot identify the source of this data."

Apple, Jobs told The Times wanted to figure out what was wrong on its phones "rather than run to the P.R. department."

"The first thing we always do when a problem is brought to us is we try to isolate it and find out if it is real," he said. "It took us about a week to do an investigation and write a response, which is fairly quick for something this technically complicated."